


Shrike

by ObliObla



Series: Lucifer Songfics [8]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Hell, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, One Shot, Post-Season/Series 04, Songfic, Wings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-31
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-10-04 08:33:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20468105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObliObla/pseuds/ObliObla
Summary: There is blood on her lip, on her hands, stigmata from the thorns sticking out between her fingers.





	Shrike

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [Sarma](https://sarma.tumblr.com/) for her amazing art! And to [redledgers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redledgers/pseuds/redledgers) for her beta help!
> 
> I couldn't utter my love when it counted  
Ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now  
And I couldn't whisper when you needed it shouted  
Ah, but I'm singing like a bird 'bout it now
> 
> Words hung above, but never would form  
Like a cry at the final breath that is drawn  
Remember me, love, when I'm reborn  
As a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn
> 
> I'd no idea on what ground I was founded  
All of that goodness is going with you now  
Then when I met you, my virtues uncounted  
All of my goodness is going with you now
> 
> Dragging along, follow in your form  
Hung like the pelt of some prey you had worn  
Remember me, love, when I'm reborn  
As the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn
> 
> I fled to the city with so much discounted  
Ah, but I'm flying like a bird to you now  
Back to the hedgerows where bodies are mounted  
Ah, but I'm flying like a bird to you now
> 
> I was housed by your warmth, thus transformed  
By your grounded and giving and darkening scorn  
Remember me, love, when I'm reborn  
As the shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn  
-Hozier-

-[Sarma](https://sarma.tumblr.com/post/187406150949)

* * *

There is blood on her lip, on her hands, stigmata from the thorns sticking out between her fingers. It drips—slowly, steadily—to the floor. The tang of rust and light and life in the air blends with the ache from her wounds, the shackles cutting into her wrists, her ankles, chaining her to the cold concrete.

Or perhaps she’s being held, being kissed. Naked as Eve in the garden before she knew shame. But _she_ knows shame, knows the baseness in the hands that take her, their roughness as they press into the secret parts of her and leave her cold. There is sweet agony in the stretch, in the back-and-forth, but it tears at her tongue with its wrongness.

It’s not the act, it’s the actors. She has her exits, her entrance, all the indeterminable moments in between where she takes the low road, the slow, more sluggish road. And one woman, in her time, plays many parts.

She is lying on a bed, ropes tight around her wrists, her ankles, a blindfold over her eyes. She is held, she is kissed, her hair is brushed from her face. Things are done to her. She is not allowed to do them. She is passed between hands rough and smooth, but both brand her skin. She struggles. She is pressed back to the softness of the mattress—it might as well be a bed of nails. A cross to hang on. A gallows tree. A knife is slipped between her ribs, and there is pain, and there is blood. And she is free.

She is the pedestal, but she is not the stone. She is the perch, not the bird. The rose, not the thorn. The sword, not the hand that wields it.

She cries, alone, in a different bed. Or is it the same? The sheets are stained red—didn’t there used to be such a thing as birthing beds? A mattress to bury her loss in? Her tears pollute the white linens with blood, with rose petals. They fall as rubies—beautiful, perfect, useless. Her eyes are blurred over with her pain, with her love, with _her_. With everything that she is.

But what is she?

_Someday my prince will come_, she whispers, and hates herself. The brambles clutch at her hands, her face. Blood trickles from the corner of her mouth. She bites her lip, refuses to cry, refuses. Says no and no and no, and, when she says _yes,_ the word turns to ash on her tongue. There is venom in the ridges of her teeth and it burns her, warms her. Leaves her wanting.

She falls to her knees, cracking bone on concrete. The shackles tear flesh and her wrists bleed, nails embedded deep. Her hands tighten into fists, and the thorns dig even deeper, drawing out her very heart’s blood. The white roses stain to red in the moonlight.

He is in her mouth, and she chokes at the wrongness, at the taste, at this thing like depravity. But she steels herself and holds her breath. This is what she wants, she tells herself. This is what she’s always wanted.

All the world’s a stage, but she never wanted to be its actress. But she’ll grin and bear it; she’ll bare her flesh like a lesser child of Eve. She will be the act not the actor, and she will want this. She _will_ want this. She’ll make herself.

She is dead, but there is no stillness.

She is alive, but all the light has gone away.

* * *

He is falling. He has, perhaps, always been falling. There was no time before the winds ripping his flesh, the flames burning along his lineaments. And there will be no moment after this. He cannot see but the endless chaos of the void, cannot hear but the rush of atmosphere that tears at him. And he is alone.

Or he is surrounded, scornful faces gazing down on him. To them, he is less than the blood he spits in their vainglorious faces. Or perhaps that is simply pleasant fiction, and there is sorrow on their countenances intertwining with the anger. Light mixing with mud and muck, grace lost to mundanity. But he cannot hold so many truths in his mind as _that_, and so he lets them fall away. Lets himself fall. Away.

He has gone down into the dark, to shadows and ruin. He has gone down _again_. And he will hang himself from a gallows tree, from the roots of the world itself, and he will be its errant sacrifice. He drinks gall from a goblet made of iron on his high throne wrought in stone, the butcher bird on his perch. The thorns hiding beneath the simple beauty of a rose; the hand that wields the rusting sword. There is blood in his mouth, and he swallows it, not knowing where it came from. He has drunk of the aching bitterness and found himself unclean.

He whispers in the darkness, and no one hears. He sings in the night, and no one listens. He presses his breast to a thorn in the moonlight, and feels his own heart’s blood trickle away. And the white roses stain to red with the melody of his song.

He has told his stories to the stars, but there are no stars in chaos, in a night void of light. And they have forgotten. They have forgotten in the midst of the oblivion of eons, but he can never forget.

And, still, he is falling.

They watch him as he casts off light, as he plummets into the dark again. Everything is lost to him but the flaying wind, the rending fire, the echoes of her soft words curling within the marrow of his bones. The cruel foreknowledge of destruction—of ruin, of the fall—pierces through him as a thorn, bleeding its blossoms out onto the ground. And her tears are an ocean he cannot shed; her mouth, her lips the very earth he kneels down to kiss. But he is so far down now he can no longer reach such heights, such depths.

From the silence of the grave, from unplumbed perdition, he whispers his lament in shouts and blood shed with wanton violence. In cruelty meted out by his own hands. In the kiss of betrayal on the poisoned lips of the maiden Death. He cannot forget, but he tries, holds her, ravishes her. Loses himself in the pleasure-pain of her putrefying touch. He tries for tenderness, and he remembers the gleaming sea, the dappled sun, but she breaks his gentle grip. She takes him roughly, and he responds in kind, a mirror of someone else’s shadow. And, so very far down in the dark, he sins and sins and sins.

His voice can no longer speak in whispers. There is no birdsong in Hell.

His tongue is dead, buried in an earth where he digs and digs, his hands sweating blood, fallen to the ground. There are no stories left to tell. The sun has sunk beneath the sea, and the night sky is without stars.

And, still, he is alone.

* * *

And death was such a great price to pay for a red rose.

* * *

She is kneeling, again. Chained, again. For it has been too long down in the dark, and she has forgotten what the light is. The concrete is cold beneath her. The chains are chains of brambled thorns, and they grip at her like a touch, like a caress. Like a kiss from twisted lips. They wrap over her chest, around her arms, around her throat. Claiming her, suffocating her. She takes a breath and loses it in a cry of pain. And she is alone.

Out of the depths he has called to her, but she responds only in blood and thorns. He builds his more angelic wings out of music by what moonlight he can wrest from the darkness and sweeps up from the void to the world of stars and sun. But the sun has gone to eclipse, and there is night where there should be a far brighter shine. And in the shameful day he is lost, a shadow without its substance.

The chains, the vines, the thorns tighten, and she is dragged forward, her hands together in a mockery of prayer, her knees bruised against the more mundane ground. There is a familiar taste in her mouth, and she chokes at this thing far worse than depravity.

He wanders the Earth, a supplicant to a missing god, or perhaps a god himself, but one without grace or prayer. He kneels in the dirt and marks his failures with forgiveness. But he cannot rest until he finds his love, and so he cuts and peels a hazel wand and hooks a berry to a thread to walk among long dappled grass.

She waits. She cannot do otherwise. Thorns wrap around her tongue, kiss her lips, and take her hands. And she refuses them, but she is not allowed. Blood drips from her palms, her brow. She rages, but her voice is caught in crystal, trapped in a darker glass she cannot escape. And when her strength leaves her, and the chains tear into her wrists, rend her throat, cut a crown upon her head, she dreams of feathers drawn from starlight. Of ichor, thick and cloying on her tongue.

A day he has sought her, but a day that breathes as a year. A touch he pursues, but it only leaves him aching and hollow. The sun will not set; the moon will not rise. Her hands are bound, and his are stained with promises unkept. When he closes his eyes, he sees nothing.

She wakes. It is dawn, or maybe dusk. There are whispers behind the rustling and clattering of thorns and chains, but she can’t parse their meaning. She cannot see for the blood in her eyes, or maybe it’s the tears she can no longer feel.

The hope in his heart is a flickering candle flame, but it has all gone to storm, now. There are only tempests and cruel winds, and the fire is drowned in the sea, in the bitter rain fallen to the earth. He kneels, again, as the sun comes up, as it goes down. As it stands in judgement over loss and ruin.

She is sightless; her tongue is dull and unsure. The blood has dried into a weeping crown at her brow, into a scarlet blouse, embroidered with crimson and enwrought with rust. She chokes on bile and thorns, and breathes through the pain. Hope is faint as memory, but she clings to it still. _Someday we’ll meet again_, she whispers, and it costs her. But it costs her more to stay silent. So she pays her tolls with pennies in her mouth, down her throat. Approaches the river’s edge but finds it empty. And she pays and pays and pays.

Out of the depths she has called to him, and he heeds her. He cannot do otherwise. He finds her by touch and by taste in a tenebrae even he can’t parse, in words he no longer understands. He knows all tongues but the one that carries her love. But he doesn’t have to feel her shaking breaths to take her meaning. It is more song than speech, but he will sing his lesser harmonies, and they will lead him home.

* * *

For now they see through a glass—darkly, but face to face. And they shall know, and be known, and there will they find themselves.

* * *

The mirror is shattered.

The thorns have grown over everything left of her.

The earth has pulled him into its depths.

But there is fecund soil where rougher roots grow tender. And there is warmth even so far down in the dark. The sun rises, or sets, but it’s no matter. For the shadows of liminality have been cut by the contrast of starlight and the silence of the grave, of brambles and flesh, of bloody, white feathers. Of moonshine and melody twisted together as petals and thorns, and there, in a day that breathes as sacred night, they find each other.

And she is speechless.

And he is lost.

But they are not alone.

He wraps her in wings of moonlight, and she buries him in the oceans in her eyes. They drown in saltwater and they’re lost in light. And it doesn’t taste like Heaven, doesn’t burn like Hell. Doesn’t rise, doesn’t fall. Savors only as the Earth. And it is not careful, nor gentle, nor perfect, but it _is._ And there is tenderness in the roughness, roughness in the tenderness. And it is more than sin; is so much less than grace.

But it is theirs.

And they are together.


End file.
